The Man Who Sold the War

Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war

by James Bamford

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a
chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to
foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing
tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers
of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a
black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man's chest and
another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man's
brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a
forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was
now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical
styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an
explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted
repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to
secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal
arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in
private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the
largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration
was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House
a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the
Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri
and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons
of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp
peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer
concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the
hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political
refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the
story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in
fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR
campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for
the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long
been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of
the Washington establishment named John Rendon. . . .

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two
months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had
secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other
adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington,
Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management,"
manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve
the desired result. His firm, the Rendon
Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it
was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of
Hussein from power."

. . . Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave
them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media
guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against
Saddam. . . .

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy:
Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was
close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush
administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam
propaganda for years. . . .